Bug#749944: build ogre-1.9 against new boost-defaults 1.55?

[Scott Howard]

Thanks for all the info, sorry to make you spend time rehashing this!

For my own sanity, I'll try to summarize the technical problem:
It looks like the troublesome functions are defined in headers [1], so
ogre gets the definitions hardcoded if it pulls in the headers. Those
functions are now statically included and may only be compatible with
a specific version of boost threads.

Because of this, programs can break since ogre is no longer binary
compatible after a binNMU that bumps boost.

The currently implemented fix solution is to define a build depends to
a specefic the version of boos. That prevents ogre from secretly
becoming binary incompatible with a binNMU, but it doesn't prevent it
from happening manually. For example, even if ogre depended on boost
1.47 explicitly, this bug would have happened when ogre was bumped to
1.48 manually. I think, technically, it seems the the libogre package
name should therefore have an indication of what boost version it was
compiled against since policy says that if a new version of a library
is not binary compatible with previous versions, it must have a name
change. libogre-1.9 might have to be libogre-1.9-b1.54, and then the
next version when compiled against boost 1.55 will be
libogre-1.9-b1.55. That is awkward, but it looks like the only way to
ensure binary compatibility.

Longer term, maybe someone should talk with ogre upstream and see what
they think of this. Should ogre be doing anything differently as to
not expose those boost functions without a compiler error that there
is a mismatch?

Maybe ogre is missing [2]:
#include <boost/config/abi_prefix.hpp>
or
#include <boost/config.hpp>
in [3]?

or something with:
http://www.boost.org/development/separate_compilation.html


[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=674633#31
[2] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/boost/config/abi_prefix.hpp
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-games/ogre-1.9.git;a=blob;f=OgreMain/include/Threading/OgreThreadHeadersBoost.h;hb=HEAD